TOI ART AT TE PAPA LEVEL 4 I TEPAPA.NZ/TOIART
MICHAEL PAREKOWHAI
Détour
by ANNE ELSER
obyn Cadwallader’s second novel
is, like her first, set in medieval
England. It takes place between
1320 and 1322, the last of the
seven years known as the Great Famine,
when deluges destroyed crops and ani-
mals, and wiped out a quarter of Europe’s
population.
Meanwhile, King Edward II’s costly wars
with France and Scotland and his vacil-
lating leadership spurred internal power
struggles and violent chaos.
These perils stalk the characters’ lives.
Yet the book opens with a short, quietscene that focuses on the power of art to
overcome grief and fear: Mathilda, her
husband killed in battle against the king,
receives the illuminated prayer book
that a group of London limners (as the
illustrators were known) has
spent over two years creating
for her.
The chapters switch back
and forth in time between
two sets of engaging,
interlinked and strongly
contrasting stories: Mathilda
shelters from danger in the
remote countryside; the
painters work in the crowded,
filthy, energetic city.
Characters include the
gifted Gemma; her troubled master-
painter husband, John; and the two
young men working under him, the
haunted William and the quiet Benedict.
Both William and Gemma are driven
to question two different but seemingly
divinely ordained patterns: the existence
of unequal status, wealth and sphere; and
the right ways to depict religious themes.
As a woman, Gemma cannot claim
recognition or standing for her artisticskill; as a man of humble origins, William
cannot redress blatant injustice or be
linked with the woman he comes to love.
Yet both manage to find ways to express
their artistic genius in their work, which
the author describes superbly.
Cadwallader provides a
wholly convincing picture of
14th-century lives without
ever intruding. She success-
fully conveys the labour,
dexterity and creativity
required for manuscript
illumination, from the
painstakingly production of
colours to the application of
various kinds of gilding.
She shows Gemma secretly
writing a manual for apprentices, includ-
ing her own son (short extracts from it
open and shed light on each chapter).
Cadwallader’s work itself resembles illu-
mination in its intense focus on a small
sphere in order to convey a broad array
of human emotions, ideas and relation-
ships with great precision, beauty and
relevance. l
BOOK OF COLOURS, by Robyn Cadwallader
(Fourth Estate, $36.99)Lives of the
illuminators
Medieval specialist
ofers beautiful tale of
women toiling in the
margins of history.